site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Resettlement was actually resettlement

One of the justifications for Holocaust was that Jews were implacable and treacherous, hence exacerbating the partisan problem on the eastern front by shipping in a million+ Jews there in 1942... yeah, pretty funny suggestion.

What's a next suggestion, that Stalin somehow accepted ~ 2 million assorted European Jews who didn't speak Russian in some sort of very sneaky prisoner transfer ?

Well, the alternative was for them to remain concentrated in the ever-growing ghettoes. They identified this is as a huge problem for three reasons: 1. The risk of organized revolt which is what happened in the Warsaw ghetto. 2. Sanitary conditions created health risks, including foremost epidemic typhus which threatened to spread to the Eastern Front and Germany, and 3. The desire to economically exploit the moveable/immovable property concentrated in the ghettos as well as Jewish labor.

There certainly were well-documented complaints about the risk of partisan activity with deportation. But it should be reasonable to see why the first three factors were given priority. It's not obvious that keeping all Jews in one place is less risky than having a Jewish labor pool dispersed across a larger area at many different, smaller camps.

So, according to you, keeping a mass of hostile people penned up in a ghetto, slowly starving to death and dying of disease is a less secure than having them dispersed over a large area ?

Typhus is spread by lice, thus dispersing the infected populations so they could mingle with non-infected would have been the wrong move.

Also, in 1942 the problems with feeding even non-Jewish forced laborers in Germany were such that attrition rate was high.

Really kind of ridiculous and I don't understand why you think Germans wouldn't have simply gassed the jews ?

By 1941 gassing undesirable people was policy in Germany - it's been ongoing on a small scale for a year.

This entire post hinges on the idea that the Jews represented some insidious threat to Germany. The Nazi could have just, you know, not forced all the Jews into either ghettoes or camps.

Well, SS is correct on this point. The question is not whether the Jews were threats to Germany but whether the Germans perceived them as such, which they did. The existential threat that Jewry supposedly posed to Germany was the justification for all of the anti-Jewish measures up to and including the Holocaust (as Himmler put it, "we had the right to kill this people that wanted to kill us"). That said, because the Jews were viewed as such a menace, the Nazis concentrated them in ghettoes where they could keep an eye on them. This concentration was explicit Nazi policy, and as soon as the German Army conquered Poland, Heydrich issued orders for Jews to be cleared from the countryside and concentrated in a few large cities.. Sprinkling them piece-meal out over the eastern front, directly in the rear of the embattled German Army, makes absolutely no sense and is in direct contradiction to established Nazi policy. There is also no evidence for it.

Germany had many, many labor camps in the East, here is a map of only some of them put together by a Revisionist. The best known camps were all along the transportation lines that became the subject of the gas chamber extermination rumor.

Germany was setting up camps and collection sites everywhere:

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data...

When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html

So you say "sprinkling them piece-meal... makes absolutely no sense" when it is absolutely proven there were at least 42,000 different camps and collection sites.

If you look at the maps you linked, you will see that the camps are mostly concentrated in the territory of the former Polish Republic and thin out rapidly the further east you go. Anyways, Himmler ordered the ghettoes in the occupied east liquidated in 1943 so obviously Polish and western European Jews weren't deported to ghettoes that didn't exist anymore. That same year he ordered that no Jews were to remain in the GG except absolutely essential workers, so they weren't there either.

If you look at the maps you linked, you will see that the camps are mostly concentrated in the territory of the former Polish Republic and thin out rapidly the further east you go... That same year he ordered that no Jews were to remain in the GG except absolutely essential workers, so they weren't there either.

Yes, no plan survives contact with the enemy. The eastern front collapsed and Germany lost the war. Plans in 1942 or orders in 1943 are not going to necessarily reflect the state of the East in 1944. The point is that it is demonstrable that Jews were separated piecemeal across tens of thousands of camps and used as a mobile labor force in a network of camps which existed along the lines that are alleged to have been homicidal Holocaust trains.

On the other hand, you claim to know the precise GPS coordinates of where every single one of 1.5 million+ Jews were murdered and are buried, but 0% of those remains have ever been identified in scientific excavation. In order to reverse the burden of proof for your extraordinary claim: that they were murdered in homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, buried, then unburied and burned on makeshift open-air pyres, the gambit is to demand that Revisionists find the Jews which would have remained in Communist-occupied territory.

Himmler ordered the liquidation of the eastern ghettoes in summer 1943 while Sobibor and Treblinka were still in operation. You don't liquidate deportation destinations while you're deporting people there.

Wilhelm Kube complains about a single transport of 1,000 Warsaw Jews sent to work at a Luftwaffe plant, because he says he just cleared his district of Jews, so why are they sending him new ones? He would not say this if he knew the plan was to dump millions of Polish and western Jews on his doorstep. Obviously this was not the case.

The point is that it is demonstrable that Jews were separated piecemeal across tens of thousands of camps and used as a mobile labor

Obviously the 60% of Polish Jews that were non-laboring were not sent to random work camps all over the eastern front.

On the other hand, you claim to know the precise GPS coordinates of where every single one of 1.5 million+ Jews were murdered and are buried, but 0% of those remains have ever been identified in scientific excavation.

Andrzej Kola verified the presence of huge quantities of human ash in the ground at Belzec, Mattogno's cope arguments to the contrary aside.

Wilhelm Kube complains about a single transport of 1,000 Warsaw Jews sent to work at a Luftwaffe plant

His complaint proves that Warsaw Jews who were deported during the period of operation of the Treblinka “death camp” ended up to the east of it, across the Bug River. By all accounts the first transport of Warsaw Jews to Treblinka was 23 July 1942. Kube's telegram is one week later, 31 July 1942, so a complaint about a "single transport" is no indication there were not further transports. Kube's complaint was about the partisan problem and spread of disease, but he actually protested against “further independent import of Jews” (weiterer selbständiger Judeneinfuhr), suggesting further transports with coordination would be acceptable.

Kube's protests wouldn't have changed the plan in any case, as the response to Kube read "the practical realization of the solution of the Jewish problem is exclusively a matter for the police".

Kube's interaction shows the arrival of Warsaw deportees East of the Bug after the departure of the earliest transports. What is lacking in any of these interactions is a mutual understanding of a general, secret extermination plan, and Kube's threats given further "independent import of Jews" rings hollow if the policy was to kill them all in the first place.

Andrzej Kola verified the presence of huge quantities of human ash in the ground at Belzec, Mattogno's cope arguments to the contrary aside.

He verified no such thing, as was shown by Mattogno. Core samples and a bunch of fallacious estimates are not a substitute for an actual excavation. There's no legitimate excuse for a lack of excavations of the alleged mass graves.

More comments

What's a next suggestion, that Stalin somehow accepted ~ 2 million assorted European Jews who didn't speak Russian in some sort of very sneaky prisoner transfer ?

This is unironically what Holocaust revisionists believe.